On the NYR Daily: What Africa's "Renaissance Generation" gave the world

On the NYR Daily this week Today, our featured author is Aminatta Forna, whose essay “[Obama and the Legacy of Africa’s Renaissance Generation](” we just posted. Aminatta recently published her fourth novel, Happiness, but her first book was a memoir, [The Devil That Danced on the Water](, about her quest to learn more about her father and the truth of the central events of her childhood, his arrest and execution in Sierra Leone. That book established Forna, formerly a TV journalist, as a writer—though becoming known for autobiographical writing has hazards as well as rewards, as Aminatta discussed in her earlier essay for the Daily, “[The Afterlife of a Memoir](.” Her father, Mohamed Forna, the son of a regent chief in Sierra Leone, was a promising young man who—as many of Africa’s rising elite did in the 1950s and early 1960s—finished his education abroad, at the heart of the British Empire in its dying days. One result of this program—one presumably less anticipated or approved by the architects of the imperial system—was that many of these young African men formed romantic attachments with women they met while students: in Scotland, Mohamed met and married Aminatta’s mother. Joe Appiah, the Ghanaian father of regular New York Review contributor Kwame Anthony Appiah, was another who met his spouse this way (and you’ll want to check out the family photo that Anthony kindly allowed us to use to illustrate Aminatta’s essay). But perhaps the best-known name of all these Western-educated Africans was Barack Obama Sr. Returning to their native lands, they were to be a new class of brilliant technocrats in the era of decolonization—what the writer Wole Soyinka called Africa’s “Renaissance Generation.” Working on Aminatta’s essay, I got the feeling that the topic had been gestating for a while, so what was its genesis? “Back in the early 2000s, as the war in Sierra Leone was coming to a close, I was there researching for my memoir about my father, who had been a political prisoner in the 1970s,” she said. “When I spoke to his contemporaries, I started hearing the same story, of being awarded an overseas scholarship based on their exam results, of going to the British Council in Freetown where they were shown films about British life and culture, and of the shock of arrival in Britain. This was all in the run-up to independence for Britain’s African territories… Later, I read Wole Soyinka’s 2006 memoir You Must Set Forth at Dawn, in which he described them as the ‘Renaissance Generation.’” Photo by Nina Subin It was in the run-up to Obama’s election, in 2008, that she began to connect his story with her own. “At that point, I didn’t know that students from Kenya had gone to the United States. Everyone I knew had gone to Britain and later to the Soviet Bloc and China, as other world powers battled for the allegiance of the new African states.” There was a reason why the US tended to sponsor students from Kenya in particular—and that was because the Empire was less generous with its scholarships to the country that had consistently challenged its supremacy. As Aminatta explained: “In Kenya, there were insurgencies against British colonial rule from the 1920s right through to independence, of which the most bloody was the Mau Mau rebellion in the 1950s.” The essay is very much a tribute to the Obamas, Fornas, Appiahs, and others—but it occurred to me that while the optimism they invested in their newly independent nations would not always be repaid, they did succeed in transmitting something vital. “They were an amazing generation to be raised by because their thinking was entirely forward-looking and global,” Aminatta affirmed. “They believed they could change the world for the better and possessed a profound sense that it was their—and later, our—job to do so. It made for an exhilarating, if sometimes challenging childhood, because there was often a price to be paid for such boldness.” If the essay is intended in part to help us understand that Barack Obama was not only, as we have often seen him, the self-invented son of a single mother but also had roots in a great tradition of postcolonial African intellectuals, then what, I wondered, would they have made of him. “I think they would have been far more delighted if Barack Obama had become president of Kenya, because the future Africa was what they were most invested in,” Aminatta said. “But his election to the US presidency would have brought with it a measure of pride, that the values he espoused—and which were theirs—had carried him to the highest office in the world.” Indeed. And America could use its own Renaissance Generation right about now. For everything else we’ve been publishing, visit the [NYR Daily](. And let us know what you think: send your comments to Lucy McKeon and me at daily@nybooks.com. Matt Seaton Editor, NYR Daily You are receiving this message because you signed up for email newsletters from The New York Review. [Update preferences]( The New York Review of Books 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014 [Unsubscribe](